


you are my sweetest downfall (i loved you first)

by CreativeUsermeme



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: "Canon" - Freeform, Angst, Author has taken a lot of liberties with canon, Drow, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, POV Second Person, Romance?, Worldbuilding, drow society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-20 22:46:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreativeUsermeme/pseuds/CreativeUsermeme
Summary: [A character backstory and study of a DnD character.]You look back on where you're standing, right here and now, at a hidden tunnel escaping from the primary tunnel to the city, and it's all you can do not to scream. Things used to be better. They weren't perfect, no, not by any stretch of the imagination, but they were better.





	you are my sweetest downfall (i loved you first)

**Author's Note:**

> this writing style is way too homestuck influenced and i hate it but take something about my disaster gay son
> 
> way too much prose and bad angst ahoy
> 
> title from regina spektor's samson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcQI-BEOOAk)

Your earliest memory is wrapping your arms around your legs and watching from the top of the staircase, staying as still and quiet as you can while your mother and your sister scream at each other. The words are familiar, but you don't take the time to process them.

They pass through your mind like wind though the open shutters carrying the smell of rot and decay, things that accompany nearly memory from home.

Your mother screams about keeping the family together, your sister screams about making something of herself, the same old argument that you know you've heard before.

Can you remember something within a memory? This is the farthest back that you can think, but even early as this, none of it comes as a surprise, exactly. The routine feels familiar, even then. You suppose it must be possible, because within this reverie, the memory continues.

Arara yells something about it being her right to leave for Arach Tinilith, Mother yells something about it being  _her_ right to keep her eldest daughter at home, and the yelling continues until you leave the stairway.

Arara, of course, notices this, and it's only moments before she stands, leaning against the door frame expectantly. You have a routine with her, something that works well enough for the two of you, but you can't stop yourself from hating her. She does everything with a thin layer of blood on her hands like a pair of well-made gloves, carries the same condescending smirk and grating laugh of your mother, but with a subtlety that your mother has always lacked. There is always a lie on her mouth and a knife up her sleeve, and for this, you can't ever bring yourself to actually trust her, but you pretend the best you can. Pretending is an incredibly useful skill.

You understand instinctively that she will be leaving before the tenday is out, regardless of what your mother has to say. You bury the though as deep as you can, but it stays with you. As much as you think you hate her, at the same time, there is an amount of respect you hold for her (beyond the mandated respect of her being the eldest sibling, and a woman). She is skilled in the arts of blades and silence and shadows, and you do want to be like her, someday. She taught you the sharp edge of a knife from a hilt when you were younger and probably the largest idiot on the plane, so it only follows that she must be intelligent.

This, of course, leaves you behind her shadow, and her behind your mother's. In these two shadows, you could, you suppose, step out and forge your own path, but it is so much easier to simply revel in the shade and twist your way through the city.

The memory is brought to forefront again as Arara speaks up. "I'm leaving for good, Henin. Keep an eye on Mother." The lack of ambiguity of it hits you, and you are forced to address that you will be alone. You will never feel anything adjacent to safe, you will always be terrified of the world around you, and you make a decision, then, to scare the world back.

* * *

 

You are accepted at Sorcere a year younger than you had expected, which is a blessing that you will recognize easily. The ability to continue schooling such as that is rare, especially among those of the subservient houses such as yours, so you take the opportunity and run, run as far as you can, like you'll run enough that those that have blessed you with the opportunity itself will loose sight of you.

Your first tendays are less than a blessing. They are a relief and a nightmare of their own, that you do not know how to address. You cast with flames licking at your skin and eyes peering down your neck, constantly aware that failure will be met with sacrifice, aware that perhaps one in every hundred students accepted actually graduate. (A third of them die, a third of them drop out, and the other third simply are met by the competition.)

You're paired with one of the few female instructors, likely as a punishment for her, but the way things unfold, you end up forming a very tentative alliance with her. Her name is Hathae, and she walks with a quiet and dignified air, an aura of peace wrapped around her like a cloak, something that almost immediately makes you feel more tense. You have many instincts, and not trusting an obvious trap like that is chief among them.

She never sleeps and very rarely trances, leaving a fine shake to her hands from exhaustion, something that concerns you out of something more than professional concern a few times. The idea of trusting somebody you work and study alongside with seemed unthinkable, but you've found yourself almost caring about Hathae. She provides a constant in the months to come, and it's perhaps the end of your first year when you realize that, if you let yourself, you could not-trust her in the same way you not-trusted Arara.

The thought doesn't terrify you as much as it should.

* * *

 

A few years later into your schooling, you return to the communal quarters to find that Hathae has taken a new protege. The flicker of jealousy exists before you even meet him.

He is a year older than you and an arrogant piece of shit and frustratingly handsome and funny and you know better than to think about him too often, but he crosses your mind regardless. His name is Izalra.

You do the best you can to put him out of your mind when you can. You ignore the feeling that you're looking through a dirty of pane of glass that cleans itself when he nears, ignore the intensity of the quake to your breath when he returns to Hathae's quarters with a cut over his eye that is sure to scar, ignore how your eyes seem to drift to him whenever you aren't thinking anything in particular, ignore his delicate fingers tracing runes in the air. Everything is ignored.

You view him as a fellow student, a rival, maybe, but the lines blur and you can feel the most dangerous thing you can imagine start to happen. You almost trust him.

Your walls are broken down and the lines you've so carefully drawn between your emotions break, feelings bleeding though. You realize that you're only clinging to the hope that you don't care about him, dangling from the cliff, and you let go.

So you watch his eyes, careful and calculating in a shade of gray that reminds you of fog gathering above a lake. He examines you closely, perhaps only just seeing you in the light of anything but a rival. You phrase things as loosely as you possibly can, make it as clear as possible that he can turn you down, but you still find yourself falling into bed with him, and you still find him sending you a coy smile over an evening meal, and you still find him brushing his hand against yours, and still, and still and still and still-

You can practically feel the emotions bubbling out of you until they threaten to boil over, feel the attachment growing between you like strands of silk being carefully woven together, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

* * *

 

There is, predictably, a moment when you're pinned to the wall and Izalra's hands are tracing up your chest beneath your shirt and your arms are around his shoulders, where he pulls back, looking you in the eyes.

"If this is a debt I am to owe to you, then I need to call this off, now."

You smile and shrug. The next few moments could break whatever is left of your sanity, but downplaying your emotions comes as easily as breathing. "It is something given freely, without anything attached, if you wish it."

He pulls his hands back, shaking his head. "Anything attached?"

"I want you to survive. I want to care for you. Use it against me if you will, but I will want it all the same. If things are not the same, then they are not the same. There is not more to say about the matter."

Izalra's breath catches, and,  _yes_ , a crack in that controlled boy he presents- "And if things were the same?"

...You hadn't been expecting that.

He kisses the confused look off your face.

Even more predictably, things continue, and grow. You find yourself growing tied to him closer and closer, a hand tightening around his wrist, the gentle whisper of " _I'm here_ " between your breaths.

 

 

It is here that you become even more terrified of your emotions than usual, terrified that simply ignoring the problem and repressing things won't work, and you are completely grounded by the thought that while you do not know what love is, you think it almost looks like this.

* * *

 

Whispers spread fast about trust, and what an easy thing that is to exploit, so you plan with Izalra to run. It can't be that hard to sneak out of the city, not with a real distraction, can it?

So you provide that distraction in summoning a cloud of smoke and ink and eyes and blood, and you grab his hand and run.

A jagged spear that runs through his stomach from a guard sinks the plan and your heart in a moment. Blood soaks out of him onto the streets, and he tells you to listen, and- You take it back.

Not staying with him was your biggest mistake.

Barely breathing, he tells you to run, and... You do. What were you supposed to do?

* * *

 

And so you look back on where you're standing, right here and now, at a hidden tunnel escaping from the primary tunnel to the city, and it's all you can do not to scream. Things used to be better. They weren't perfect, no, not by any stretch of the imagination, but they were _better_.

The years blend together in a haze.

You go to the ruins of old cities, close enough to attract the attentions of guards, but you are never caught. Which is for the best. You don't trust yourself to be among people again.

You can trust yourself around the shadows that still restlessly wander the city. The ghosts are quiet things that pick up light and trace lines in the shadow, and you find yourself trailing behind them listlessly.

The pieces of you that were made of him all start to shatter, until you can feel them cutting through your skin and rejoining the stale air. Your heart tightens and tightens until you wake up from visceral nightmares screaming, reaching for nobody that's alive anymore.

Everything aches, nostalgia keeping you from rest, leaving you to look up at the cavern ceilings practically alone, only the pale and watery ghosts for company. You doubt that you're sane anymore.

Your scars grow over, and you cannot forget, or forgive, but maybe you can continue. You still feel sharp, insides crackling like broken glass, cruel and wrong, everything twisted in a reflection, but you let it happen.

There's nothing else you can do now.

**Author's Note:**

> wow is that fucking edgy or what


End file.
